Designing risk-management strategies for GEO satellite telemetry, tracking and command ground systems

Risk management strategy is the application of principles and organizational procedures designed to ensure that decision-making at every stage is informed and influenced by appropriate risk assessment processes. Effective management of trade-off between an effective system design, and risks which are associated with technical performance, schedule, operations and maintenance, resource management and system decommissioning, can lead to successful system operation. The objective of this paper is to link risk-management strategies to a system's design and performance over its life cycle. An effective system design is essential to successfully monitoring and controlling Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites. The effective design of risk strategies can play a major role for Telemetry, Tracking, and Command (TTC) Ground System success in the current market place. This paper presents the basis of a decision support framework, for the design and assessment of risk-management strategies for GEO Satellite TTC Ground Systems. The paper includes a typical example of TTC ground system decision analysis for telemetry processing, involving system outcomes as a function of strategic alternatives. We show how this decision network, coupled with expected value judgments, can be used by a decision maker to choose between possible alternatives.